#100 with Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano - The "Export Framework" to Business Creation

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) are joined by Anthony Pompliano (@APompliano) to hear about his time at Facebook and kick around a few ideas. In today’s episode Pomp talks about his experience at Facebook and Snapchat (4:05), Pomp gives the background on how he got into tech after a career in the Army (11:25), Sam expounds on the book Tribes and the impact he thinks it can have on businesses looking to build camaraderie (18:50), Pomp pitches how to reinvent dating apps to be more authentic (24:25), all three of the guys talk about how to get customers to "hook" to your product (33:05), Shaan talks about the future of automation (41:05), the group talks about how good training programs can be huge recruitment tools (50:00). - https://twitter.com/APompliano: Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano - Investments Pomp’s made: https://www.imperfectfoods.com/ (Pomp invested at $12m valuation), https://www.everlywell.com/ (Pomp invested at a $15m valuation), https://cubcoats.com/ - Book recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/1455566381 - https://lunchclub.ai/: Helps you make professional connections - https://thehustle.co/04212020-silicon-valley-clubhouse/: Audio-only social network - https://muzmatch.com/en-US/: Dating app for muslims - https://dilmil.co/: Indian dating app - https://launchdarkly.com/: Another example of an “export business”. LaunchDarkly is a “feature management” tool whose origin was within Facebook. - https://amplitude.com/: Helps companies boost engagement by analyzing data to show what signals to look for. - https://twitter.com/sweatystartup: Storage investor and service business advocate. - https://www.healthstream.com/: Teaches medical personnel latest procedures. An example of a - https://www.eagletransfer.com/: Commercial moving business owned by Sam’s father-in-law. - https://pos.toasttab.com/: POS restaurant system - https://bit.ly/2XR7sSY Convo between Kevin Systrom and Matt Cohler, on selling Instagram to Facebook This episode is presented by Tempo! Check them out at tempo.fit and use code "TempoHustle" for $100 off. Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Sam Parr?

  We're live. Sean and Pomp, you guys did a podcast together on Pomp's podcast. I actually did it last year in New York, or this year before Corona happened. Sean, who is this guy?

• 0:18Shaan Puri?

  This is Pomp, known as, he's known as Pomp. His name's Anthony Pompliano. Pompliano, is that the right way to say it? Close enough, yeah. No, no, so say it how you would say it. Pompliano. Pompliano, okay, great. This dude's everywhere, man. If you don't know him, you don't know us, probably. That's kind of my, my rule of thumb. This guy's everywhere on Twitter. Investor, ex-Facebook guy, big time in the Bitcoin world. Everybody knows him if you're in crypto. And again, if you're not in crypto, you're probably not listening to this podcast. So, I was gonna ask you how it's going, but really, all I want to know is who was better, me or Sam, on your podcast?

• 0:53Sam Parr?

  That's a horrible question.

• 0:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, Sam got to cheat, because Sam got to do it in person, and I can't remember if we livestreamed or not, but it's always easier in person, I think.

• 1:03Shaan Puri?

  It sounds like you're saying Sam, and that's not cool.

• 1:06Anthony Pompliano?

  But I actually think on the audio download, you're beating Sam in the first couple hours. We'll see.

• 1:10Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great.

• 1:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I have to go back and look.

• 1:12Shaan Puri?

  That's all that matters.

• 1:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Now Sam's gonna get competitive.

• 1:14Sam Parr?

  Well, so I just looked, I'm looking at the, someone already commented, and they said, they called Sean a goon, and I was like, gonna hop in, but it was actually a compliment. They said, I listened to this goon, and the bigger goon, Sam Parr, on my first million ever. And I was about to say, motherfucker. And then it said, hands down, the best podcast out there. Sorry, Pomp, you're my second favorite.

• 1:36Shaan Puri?

  I'll take second, that's fine. Second place to you guys is perfectly fine. I was telling Sam on the last episode, I was like, dude, I prepared for this podcast interview I did. I was like, I've sent him my email, being like, hey, you know, here's a bunch of shit we could talk about, because I know if I'm the host, that's what I want to get. And so, hopefully it turned out good. Anyways, everybody should go check it out. Go to Pomp's podcast. Yeah, listen to us talk over there. We did a bunch of, I basically took, Sam, I don't know if you heard it, I took a bunch-

• 2:02Sam Parr?

  I did, I was listening to it right before this.

• 2:04Shaan Puri?

  I took a bunch of our best ideas over there, and I was like, here's a bunch that we brainstormed, and then, you know, we just shot the shit after that.

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite part is that you sent me that really detailed email, which I told you, and I'll repeat again, was incredibly helpful, and then I didn't return the favor, so sorry.

• 2:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, well, you know, not everybody's me. Not everybody can put in that prep work. This is like, you know, one of the things I always talk about is how I'm lazy, but then when I do something, I go like really over the top with it. So I just either don't do a whole lot of things I should do. Like, for example, you know, now that I was on your podcast, I see all the smart little things you're doing. It's like, oh, it gets posted onto LinkedIn and it gets posted multiple times onto Twitter, kind of on like hits the different time zones. It's like, dude, these are, you know, basic blocking and tackling best practices, but I know I'll never do. And so we will never get the gains of that. I don't think Sam's gonna do that either.

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  If you want to, yeah, if you want to understand, I think of it in terms of batches. So like, you gotta do 50 episodes and then you've earned the right to like learn, you know, one-on-one course stuff. Then like you do another 50, now you've reached 100 episodes. Now you unlock like 201 learnings. And so as you keep going, like there's things that, you know, these folks who have done thousands of episodes, they understand it way better than you guys or myself. But it's just we gotta get to a thousand episodes and then somehow we magically learn that stuff too.

• 3:22Shaan Puri?

  Well, this is episode number 100. So this is a big milestone.

• 3:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  So, Pom, you, you are known for this podcast you have now, and you're known for being a Twitter personality, right? I mean, that's like the high level.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  To be honest, I have no clue how that happened, but uh, yeah, I think a lot of people, that's actually how they know me, which is pretty crazy.

• 3:41Sam Parr?

  How many people listen to your podcasts roughly?

• 3:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So far this year, we just last week crossed over 10 million downloads for the year.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  Wow, wow, wow, wow. So you were, and before that you worked at Snap and you worked at Facebook. Were you an executive or a product manager or what?

• 3:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I was a product manager at Facebook.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  How'd you get this job at Snap, dude? I feel like you went from like, uh, you know, normal person at Facebook to you got a pretty big job at Snap. And I know a bunch of shit went down, so I don't know if you could talk about all of it, but can you talk about how you even got that job? Cause it was a pretty legit role for what you had done before that, right?

• 4:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think a lot of it is, one, just the progression of people on the growth team at Facebook. So there's plenty of people who'd gone to go run the growth team at other kind of high-flying early-stage startups. So, you know, Ed Baker went to Uber, um, somebody went to Lyft, somebody went to Airbnb, yada, yada, whatever. So that definitely doesn't help when you kind of come from the right farm system, if you will. And then internally at Facebook, you know, really I kind of built my reputation internally, just right time, right place. Uh, I got there and they were like, hey, you should go do this Facebook pages thing. And I was like, I have a page and like, no, you have a profile. That's different than a page. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, like, what's a page? And so, you know, they were just like, hey, go grow that and small team, but just kind of worked on the right thing at the right time.

• 5:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And next thing you know, it exploded and it was kind of like this green field, right? When you haven't optimized something at all, literally just like changing the color to a button can lead to, you know, 15% gain or whatever it is. And so very quickly it just became like, hey, there's this game of growth. And you seem to be pretty good at it. So like, let's move you around internally and kind of do a bunch of different things. And then I think really just reputation spreads from there.

• 5:25Shaan Puri?

  And I got one question for you from your time to Facebook. So on the brainstorm, when we do the brainstorms, we have all these different kind of like themes, something like we just find that a bunch of ideas fit in these same buckets. And so one of the buckets I always talk about is what I call the export bucket, which is like, if you're ever at a big company, you see a whole bunch of problems and solutions. And so you see problems that you didn't know existed. And it's like, dude, we would import a solution. We would buy a solution for this. If somebody could solve this problem for us, we would have bought. And then on the other side, it's like, we have this problem. We kind of made an internal tool. Man, if this should actually be exported, every company should have this tool. And I think Facebook is probably the most popular one where that has happened. Where they just, people have left Facebook and just tick the Facebook internal tool and made it a SaaS tool for everybody else.

• 6:09Shaan Puri?

  Is that something you've seen? Like, can you talk a little bit about that? Cause I don't think most people know about that.

• 6:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So definitely that is a one strategy. There was also, although many of them I think have left at this point, there was this like little angel investor mafia at Facebook. And it was kind of like the rite of passage. If you were leaving to go to a competitor, they weren't excited. If you were leaving to go to like a non-competitive but large tech company, you know, hey, well, wish it is. And then if you're leaving to start a company, you basically had to like, go see the mafia, right? In kind of a very nice friendly way, but really it was just, you could literally walk out of the door with angel investment, right? And kind of have your pre seed round or seed round done. And so through that process, there's a lot of people who just say, hey, I'm going to go build, you know, X company. It's like, why internal tool, but for everybody else?

• 6:53Shaan Puri?

  And everybody gets it right away. They're like, oh, yeah.

• 6:55Anthony Pompliano?

  They're like, I use that every day. Right? So I mean, one of them that I, I'm sure it's out there. I haven't. Seen it, but was a huge factor to Facebook's growth was internationalization is the way they described it. But the way they did it was really key. Early on, Facebook looked at other companies like, well, how do you get into international markets? Like it's a different language. And so most people would go and they would like translate their site, do all that kind of stuff. Facebook actually took the opposite, which was they just open sourced it to some degree. They basically said, hey, if you're a user and you speak both like, you know, English and whatever the national language is like, can you help us? And all of this support poured in. And so they were able to basically tap into the user base and get all of the translations done. And also get it done much more accurately, faster, kind of more scalable, whatever.

• 7:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I've always won that mechanism of just like, how do you have a tool that you can ask your users to do the work for you? So it creates a better experience for them and all of the other users on the platform. That's like a really interesting mechanism. And then the second is specifically around translation. You know, most companies now that the internet's become much more kind of adopted around the world. Literally just getting into new markets by translating could, could lead to a lot of growth. So that's kind of an immediate.

• 8:04Sam Parr?

  What was your title at Snapchat?

• 8:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Officially, I think it was, I actually don't remember either head of, head of growth or growth lead. I can't remember. Basically it was like, hey, you're going to come and run the growth team.

• 8:15Sam Parr?

  Awesome. Wow. Okay. What do you want to do?

• 8:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Twitch hates it because I just put random shit as my title on LinkedIn. That doesn't match my internal title. Because my internal title is like a real technical, like it's like 10 words long. I'm like, no, I think what I really do is I lead international growth. So I'm going to say I'm the head of international growth. There is no such a role inside of Twitch, but I'm the, if there was one, I think I might be that. And it pisses people off to no end, but I'm like, dude, this is one of those things, it can't be enforced. Or nobody's going to really enforce it. And it's just really funny how people do that. Everyone's like a VP on LinkedIn. And internally they're like junior associate. So one, one of the things that cracks me up, you know, I grew up on the East Coast, went to the West Coast. And there was definitely like this culture difference between kind of East Coast companies, but also like the Wall Street versus Silicon Valley type thing.

• 9:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And so now back living in New York, and what you see is like every single person, like you know exactly where they are, the org structure by their title on Wall Street. Right? Are they an analyst? Are they a principal? Are they a managing director? Are they a VP? Like it's pretty well documented and kind of, you know, uh, you know, level set, right? Yeah. And it's like, and by the way, and people like really want a title.

• 9:20Shaan Puri?

  In Silicon Valley, it's exactly what you just described, like literally people, you know, "Hey, I'm the chief janitor," right? Like, they could care less about the titles, you know, it's just kind of like joking around, and it's much more about kind of the work product. So, I don't know, just an interesting tidbit that I've noticed kind of going back and forth between the two coasts.

• 9:35Sam Parr?

  And you're known as like a Bitcoin guy. I mean, that's like one of your, one of your, one of your worlds, right?

• 9:41Shaan Puri?

  You guys are coming up with every label possible. It's like, hey, you're the Twitter guy, you're the podcast guy, you're the Bitcoin guy, you're the investing guy.

• 9:48Sam Parr?

  You know how like Sean's the framework guy. Sean loves framework. I, I tend to like, I like to label stuff, and I like to put it in these boxes because it helps me understand, even though I know that it's not the whole truth, it's just-

• 10:02Shaan Puri?

  Nine times out of 10, well, somebody will come on and they'll be like telling about their, it's like, "What do you, what does your business do?" We ask, as you should. They explain for like two minutes, and Sam's like, "I'm gonna say, like, in stupid words, basically what you guys do is you charge a whole bunch of money for people to read your newsletter, or whatever, you know, like some random, like, simple oversimplification. It's great."

• 10:21Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a super powerful skill to have, is take complex ideas and get them into simple language.

• 10:25Sam Parr?

  Well, it's like, it's like, look, I know that, like, I'm gonna insult you, but you're basically like MySpace, but you're like a little better and different, correct?

• 10:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so what is your, using that logic, what's your description of the hustle?

• 10:37Sam Parr?

  I usually say, we're like Wall Street Journal, but for like 20-year-old dudes who are interested in entrepreneurship.

• 10:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's not, that's not the dumbed-down version. That's, that's still like kind of congratulatory.

• 10:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the sales pitch?

• 10:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's-

• 10:49Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 10:51Shaan Puri?

  That's what you want it to be.

• 10:52Sam Parr?

  We, we, we write about a bunch of business stuff, and some people pay money to advertise, and other people pay money to access the information. I don't know, is that right?

• 10:59Shaan Puri?

  It would just be like, every morning, we said out, like, I send an email with the news, and a shit-ton of people read it. Like, that's, that's basically what you guys do.

• 11:08Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fair.

• 11:08Sam Parr?

  That's what I like saying, calling it a newsletter business is kind of simple, but, okay, I, that is my own, you're giving me my own medicine. But, what, you're, you're known as, I mean, you do, you do a lot of Bitcoin stuff, right?

• 11:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 11:21Sam Parr?

  Got it. Okay. I'm just trying to give the audience some perspective here.

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So, yeah. All right. So look, basically, here's the hell of it. The way I think about it is I was in the army. I then built two very small technology companies that essentially were failures, but I like navigated nicely. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, did way better than I should have then went to Facebook, went to Snap and then started investing full time. And started out kind of full generalist, early-stage investor and then like double and triple down on Bitcoin and crypto and all that stuff. And, you know, I still do some things outside of it, but for the most part, that's pretty much it. And I just think it's like one of the most innovative areas.

• 12:00Sam Parr?

  And did you make enough money at Snap and Facebook that you're using your own funds to invest in stuff? Is that how it worked? Or did you raise money?

• 12:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So in the beginning, one of my partners and I, we started out with personal capital and we did, I think it was like eight deals or something. So it wasn't a lot of money that we kind of put out there, but it was definitely enough where we kind of felt like, hey, do like, we know what we're doing. Right? Like, can we like find a deal? Can we negotiate the actual terms? Like, will an investor take our money? Like all the basic stuff that like, if you're really kind of insecure when you're first starting something new, you want to make sure like, if I'm going to lose money, it's going to be mine, not somebody else's. And it also is helpful when you've got a partner who he sold a company for almost half a billion dollars.

• 12:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that helps.

• 12:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, yeah, so he like, you know, is a little bit more, you know, wealthy than most people. But when we were doing this, it was just like, hey, like, do know what we're doing. And then once it was like, okay, like, these are like interesting and like, we could like show other people like, hey, here's the first eight that we did. Like, we'll put these into a fund if you put money into the fund too. And then like, we'll like be partners. And the LPs were like, oh, that sounds awesome. And so literally we did that. And then what we started to do, again, because we had no clue what we were doing, is we would go to a founder and we'd be like, hey, your company looks awesome. You're awesome. We want to invest, but like, we're like raising the fund as we're writing the checks. So like, I want to invest, but like, let me come back to you with a number. Once I like go talk to the LPs.

• 13:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And then we'd go back and we'd be like, hey, if you put money into the fund, then we can do this deal. Like, here's the actual deal. Isn't this a great deal? They'd be like, that's an awesome deal. Like, okay, cool. Like, if you give us 100K, then like, we're going to put 100K in this company. Plus you get exposure to all the other deals in the fund. And so LPs are like, oh, this is awesome. And they would give us the money and then we would do it. And so like, that's like very like hand-to-hand combat fundraising type stuff. But when you're starting out and literally you'll take like 50, 100K checks for like a pre-seed fund. It's just the only way that you can is to like build a track record, right? And then once you

• 13:51Sam Parr?

  Did any of them work?

• 13:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I probably can't share the financials, but people, a lot of people know this. So we invested in Imperfect Produce in the, I will call it C round. It was like $12 million valuation. That company has done incredibly well. We also invested in Everly Wellness. That's their like Okay. So yeah, so Julia, I think we invested like $15 million valuation. They're absolutely crushing it. What else is in there?

• 14:17Shaan Puri?

  These weren't crypto projects. You were just doing tech investing.

• 14:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, these are all early stage, completely agnostic. Like what was really interesting is we live on the East Coast in North Carolina. We were doing remote investing, only there wasn't the cool term for it at the time. It basically was like use your computer and try to be smart and like outwork people. Because you don't live in San Francisco or New York at the moment. And so we ended up investing, I think it was like 12 or 14 cities or something. Like we literally didn't care where people were located because it was all virtual. And the second thing was 25% of the founders were female. Right? So 25% of the companies had a female founder, I think is the right way to say it. But like, that wasn't a mandate. It's like after the fact, like all the me too stuff happened, like all that. We like, huh, I wonder how many, you know, female founders we have in our portfolio. We went and like did the math. And I do think that this whole idea of having like investing remotely

• 15:05Anthony Pompliano?

  just naturally like broadens the horizon. You're willing to kind of invest in other geographies, other types of people, whatever. So it'd be interesting to see kind of the COVID impact to early stage investing.

• 15:15Sam Parr?

  All right. Today's episode is brought to you by Tempo. Tempo.fit is the website. I actually use this. I've used this for a few months now. And it's this machine that has a touchscreen and this 3D sensor. And what it does is they give you weights, like 115 pounds in weights. And it's for strength training. So what it is, is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting. It sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in, what your heart rate is. It's pretty amazing. And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift, how many to lift, what workout to do, whether you want to do a 20 minute, 10 minute, 50 minute workout. It's pretty amazing, but the best part is the leaderboard. The other stuff, all the features that they have, that's cool. But I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it

• 15:58Sam Parr?

  Measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class. So it's made me want to work harder, lift more weight, or have more endurance. It's just pretty freaking fun and the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer. And this product Tempo, it checks that box for me. So they're our sponsor today. If you use the code TEMPOHUSTLE, you'll get a hundred dollars off. So tempo.fit is the URL and TEMPOHUSTLE, one word, you'll get a hundred dollars off. So check it out. I use it. If you look me up on Twitter, you'll see I'm always filming videos where I'm talking to that company, saying I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard. Cause I actually love this thing and I, and I use it all the time. So check it out.

• 16:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the last business I'll mention is a company called Cubcoats. This one's awesome.

• 16:43Shaan Puri?

  I know those guys. Yeah.

• 16:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, do you? Okay.

• 16:45Shaan Puri?

  Well, I, I've, I've met him and then other friends have told me about Cubcoats since, since I met him. Cause he was always doing a little internet, internet tricks, basically. And I was like, this guy's smart.

• 16:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, man.

• 16:55Sam Parr?

  What is it?

• 16:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, we invested, it was called Jacket Pets at the time. And Jacket Pets was literally the idea of this kid, Zach Park, who, if I remember correctly, he like basically would-

• 17:07Shaan Puri?

  Kickstarter guy.

• 17:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. He would like go to people, be like, Sam, you've got an awesome product. I'll put it on Kickstarter and like, I know the formula and we'll sell like $10 million on Kickstarter. And he did this like multiple times and then eventually it was just like, hey, I'm gonna do this for myself. And so Jacket Pets was, uh, take a stuffed animal, kids don't want to leave it behind. And so like, let's put a zipper in the back and then when you unzip the stuffed animal, you can like, turn it inside out, like press it inside out and it'll turn into a kid's jacket. And so like, you're like, ah, that's kind of like a crazy idea, but like this kid understands Kickstarter. Like, I'm sure he could like, you know, come out of the gate. And then we shared a couple of LPs who were already in the fund and every single one of them was like, my wife would buy that tomorrow. Or like, my husband thinks this is a great idea, you know, whatever for my kids. We're like, okay, this might have legs. We invest.

• 17:52Anthony Pompliano?

  He, one kills Kickstarter, I forget the metrics, but like, you know, knocks out the park. Two, then he goes and he starts licensing. So he does like licensing deals with everyone from like major sports leagues to like the Disney marvels of the world, whatever. And then he gets them into retail, he's selling them online. Like he just like explodes the business, uh, as one of our best performing investments is like, you know, he's doing like- It is eight figures of revenue. We'll put it that way.

• 18:18Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 18:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so it's like a real business, right? It's not like a, hey, we sold $300,000 on Kickstarter and like, we're cool. It's like a legitimate business where Kickstarter happened and then they built a scalable business on the backend. You have both retail and online.

• 18:30Sam Parr?

  Okay. I want to talk about some ideas, Sean. Is okay if we get into it?

• 18:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I've never said no.

• 18:35Sam Parr?

  Okay. Uh, before we do, well, this is kind of an idea. I want to, I'm writing down my notes of what you're talking about. I want to talk about this export stuff from Facebook, but I'm currently traveling, Pom. I'm looking for where I want to settle down. And there's this great book I'm reading and I'm learning about called Tribe. Have you heard of that?

• 18:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Tribe?

• 18:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And

• 18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I have not.

• 18:56Sam Parr?

  Okay. It's called Tribe and it's all looks at like what makes tribes. And one of the guys, one of the points this guy makes is that in Israel, the rate of PTSD for soldiers is like 1%, but in America, it's like 25% because soldiers go and do their thing and they shockingly, well, this is shocking for me as someone who's never done anything like that. They are depressed when they come home because they love being in a tribe in the military and they, even though they're risking their lives and they were drinking like you showed me, non-alcoholic beer. And there were so many reasons to be unhappy because it was hard. They felt wonderful or they felt camaraderie. And that gave them fulfillment. And it's like they are in the trenches to not really serve their country, but to help their, their, their peers, their partners in, in the military.

• 19:41Sam Parr?

  And it gave them purpose. And in America, we do a really bad job of like, you know, we go to our suburban home and it's like, get off my property or, you know, stay away from my home. This is mine. That's yours. Did you sense that when you came home from, you were in Afghanistan, you said, right?

• 19:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Iraq.

• 19:57Sam Parr?

  Iraq, sorry.

• 19:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So for those that don't know, I was in the military for six and a half years, ended up when I left the military as a sergeant in the infantry. Did deployment to Iraq in 2008, 2009, was in Tajji, which is like 12 miles north of Baghdad. So I've never heard it described as the tribes and I'll, I'll read the book and let you know what I think about that specifically. But one of the things I've always told people is, uh, people, you know, are like weird and they always have like ask like stupid questions. And so they'll be like, well, why don't you have PTSD? Right. And I'm like, okay, well, I guess we're just gonna have that conversation. And like sometimes people ask like within the first 20 minutes of meeting them, you're like, man, you really have no filter. But the way that I've always like, thought about it is I went from playing football in college, which is like a pretty violent sport. All dudes, a lot of camaraderie, like all that kind of stuff.

• 20:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So then I got deployed when I was a junior. So I literally got pulled out of school, got deployed to a much more violent situation, right? Obviously there's guns, there's bullets, bombs, all this kind of stuff. But still all dudes and a lot of camaraderie. And then when I came back, I actually went back and played football. So my transition back was not like in Iraq, two weeks on, you know, transitioning back and then like working at, you know, one of my friends at Home Depot. Right? Like, that's like a really, really, you know, black and white contrast. For me, it was going back into playing football, violent sport, right camaraderie. Guys, like, all of the ingredients were there. They basically just took away our guns, right? And so I've always credited that with like the transition being much easier.

• 21:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And it makes a lot of sense in this tribes kind of framework where we probably could do much better if we literally just kept people tied into something or it's my identity or whatever.

• 21:35Sam Parr?

  Do you feel like, where do you, you and your wife, congratulations, by the way, you and Paulina, right? Do you guys, you live in Manhattan now?

• 21:44Anthony Pompliano?

  We do.

• 21:45Sam Parr?

  Do you feel like you have tribe, a tribe at all in a high-rise building?

• 21:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So in the building, no, I don't even think I could tell you a single person that we know in the building by name. But, you know, I mean, you get like easy stuff like the doorman and stuff like that, that we talk to every day, whatever. But we've got a lot of friends, right, that are kind of all throughout Manhattan and, you know, we generally are are social to some degree and try to kind of meet up with people every weekend or whatever. So I think that helps. It's just not, you know, building specific.

• 22:16Sam Parr?

  The reason I'm bringing this up is because this is a business podcast and I think that there's a ton of opportunity that's going to happen. I think that Gen Z and now our generation, because we're remote, I think there's going to be a massive, massive problem with loneliness. And men in particular, above the age of 30, who are single, have a huge problem meeting people. And I was reading the stats and it's crazy that since the 1950s, right after World War II, as we moved to the burbs and as we got a little bit more stoic, like where men aren't supposed to, you know, talk to men with a sense of love, although I think that's improved a lot recently.

• 22:59Sam Parr?

  But anyway, I think men are going to be crazy lonely, more lonely than normal in the next handful of years. And as someone who's ex-military, I don't hang out with a lot of military guys. I was like, I wonder if he experienced that because there's some opportunity there, I think.

• 23:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So two things that I would say is, one, I definitely think that businesses that are able to build the communities, not just have customer bases, are going to do incredibly well coming, you know, coming out of this whole COVID thing and then also just in general in a digital age. And some of it is like addressing the loneliness and then some of it also is just the internet provides you the ability to find people who have similar interests, right? And like, that's really hard to do if you didn't have the internet and you lived in Manhattan. Like you basically would have to like, try to go to bars and find like, okay, where's the people who like my sports team, right? Or like, where's this, whatever. The internet, you just like, go to, I don't know, chicago bears.com, even though they're not a very good team, because the Giants are better. But, you know, it's like that, that's kind of one piece. And then the second piece also is, I still think that there's a ton

• 23:58Anthony Pompliano?

  of innovation to happen around meeting people. So you see some of this with like the, what is it? Lunchtime.ai or something, right?

• 24:07Shaan Puri?

  Lunchmate.

• 24:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Or LunchBuddy or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, whatever it is. You see this with like the clubhouse, kind of the drop in audio, whatever. But it's just like, I think a lot of people think of that category specifically as like, oh, it's over, right? Like, oh, we have Twitter, we have whatever. Like, I actually think that it hasn't even started yet. And even if you go to the extent of, so here's an idea for you. Dating apps, what's the number one problem with dating apps? And if you guys had to guess, if you went and talked to a hundred people, what do you think their biggest issue would be?

• 24:36Sam Parr?

  For women creepy men, I guess, inappropriate men.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So along those lines, one of the things I've heard people talk about over and over again is like the false promotion, right? Like, oh, this guy looked like he was gonna be so hot and attractive and whatever. And like, I met him, he looks nothing like his photo, right? Or like, man, this girl, like, I was so into her. And then like, we met for a date and she had like a squeaky voice. And like, I didn't want to like hang out with her anymore. She was annoying, right? Or whatever. And so I think that one of the opportunities, and I've literally pitched this to so many people and nobody will build it. So like whoever builds it, please reach out to me, is to create a dating app just called Authentic. And all you do is you hold down the screen, right? So there's no profiles, there's no texts, there's no anything. When you open the app, you just hold

• 25:21Anthony Pompliano?

  down the screen to create your profile and a random question pops down. And it's the selfie video, you've got to answer it on the spot, just like you would, you know, a date or an event or whatever. And you can review it afterwards, but you can't save it. So you either get to choose right then and there, I want this to be public, or I want to discard it. And then if you discard it and you hold that down again, you get a different question. You don't know what the questions are. It's completely, you know, kind of authentically you. There's no filters, there's nothing. It's video. So I get to hear your voice. I get to see your mannerisms. I get to see if you're smart or not, whatever. And not only do I think people would create the content, imagine the consumption experience. It would be like watching, you know, American Idol audition tapes, right? Like, you could just sit there and just keep there and just keep scrolling.

• 26:06Sam Parr?

  So would you, but would you, I would never invest in the dating space, would you?

• 26:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that, again, going back to, people think that category is over. I think it's probably one of the most ripe categories for not only disruption, but also to, those businesses make incredible amounts of money when done correctly.

• 26:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but so few of them are done correct. Like, like, there's, it's like one of those, it seems like one of those spaces where there's a few winners that kill it and then everyone else dies.

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  Do you know what? Name a space that's not like that, right? What space does not have a handful of winners and then everybody else dying, right?

• 26:40Sam Parr?

  Plumbers, cleaning services, like, fuck.

• 26:43Shaan Puri?

  Are you gonna go invest in a plumber? Like, what is the plan?

• 26:46Sam Parr?

  I mean, like, I don't know. What I mean is with a plumber, it's like a dating app to marketplace. So you need everyone.

• 26:53Shaan Puri?

  That's the type of investing he does. You put in, you put in a dollar and you're trying to get over a hundred back. And like, the only types of companies that can return a hundred thousand X are gonna be. Things where there's a few winners that that win that win big, right?

• 27:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, hold on. Do you guys know what Muzz Match is?

• 27:09Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 27:09Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I don't. Tell me. These guys, these guys are gonna love the fact that I'm even mentioning that. They don't even remember. I talked to them three or four years ago. It's a dating app for Muslims. Muslims have the largest religion in the world and there are a number of intricacies and nuances to dating. So please God, hopefully I don't get any of this wrong, but like little things like, are you halal or not, right? Like what food do you consume? Are you willing to move to another country if you meet the right person on this app? Right? Like all of these little things that are very specific to that segment of the world population. They created an app and it's the largest dating app in the world for Muslims. And when I first heard that, I was like, what do they got like 50,000 users? Like, no, it's a massive business and I haven't talked to them in literally two or three years.

• 27:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't know kind of how it's played out, but I still see them all the time online, mentioned and stuff like that. So it's like, you could go do that for every single religion. And I think people have done that. You can go, you know, city by city, you can do all these different things. And so you could take an industry and just segment it and then just rebuild the same infrastructure with a different kind of skin on it. And, uh, and probably do pretty well.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  I have a friend who did almost exactly that. Uh, not really a friend. I mean, I met the guy and he came to one of my kind of like founder mastermind things. And it's like, cool. What are you doing? It's like just a handful of people. He's like, I'm gonna build this dating app for Indian people. I was like, oh, great. I was at the time I was a single Indian person. I was like, great, talk to me. And I realized it's definitely not for me because he was like, the name was in Hindi is Dil Mil, which means like hearts meeting or something. And then basically what it was, was like, it's people who wanted to get married. So it was more like the match.com or whatever. I remember, you know, the thing you're talking about where every group has like these small nuances that make a huge difference to them. He was, he did like login or you had to sign up with LinkedIn. I was like, what the hell is this? And he's like, dude, any people care about like what your profession is? If you don't have a job, like you're not a candidate, like you, you should not be in the pool if you don't have a job.

• 28:58Shaan Puri?

  And that's for straight up, that's how like kind of old school Indian people think is like, number one, you know, good job, good family, fair skin, tall. Like these are the attributes and if you're, you can miss one, but you can't miss like job, for example.

• 29:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, there's, there's farmer dating.

• 29:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 29:15Shaan Puri?

  Farmers or whatever. It's something like that. Yeah. So there's all these niches. And so he sold, so anyways, I remember that day being like, uh, this is interesting. Actually, that could work. And then he was like really stubborn about one thing and I was like, okay, I don't want to invest in this guy. He's just so stubborn. He was like really insistent that you would only have seven seconds to look at a profile and decide. And I was like, cool. Like, that's an interesting mechanic, but like also might be total bullshit. And like, you might throw it away. He's like, no, trust me. No. And I was like, all right, this guy's just like way too stubborn. Anyways, fast forward a few years, he sells that this year for $50 million to, I think, one of the conglomerate groups like Match or whoever like

• 29:50Sam Parr?

  IAC or whatever.

• 29:51Shaan Puri?

  All of these. Yeah. They, they own all the dating apps. Because he picked a segment and like, you know, just drove that segment home and knew how to acquire users who had that particular problem.

• 30:01Sam Parr?

  That's pretty badass. Good for him.

• 30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I love that idea. Like, and by the way, this is like a recurring theme is if you go and if you ask a bunch of people, like, what are the verticals that are played out? Like, those are actually probably the best ones to go after.

• 30:15Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's like just where everybody has written off at this point.

• 30:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It, it's just like consumer social 18 to 24 months ago. Actually, like, pretty good time to start. And you see the rise of TikTok. All of a sudden, you see, you know, all these things like explode. It's just right when everyone thinks it's over, like, here we go again.

• 30:35Sam Parr?

  So Sean has kind of like invented this export business topic that I want to bring up in a second. So think about like what could be exported from Facebook or Snap or whatever.

• 30:43Shaan Puri?

  I can give you an example of one that was that I, that I heard of.

• 30:46Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, yeah. Tell you, tell your example, Sean, and then let them, and then we'll go to one topic and then come back. So he has time to think.

• 30:51Shaan Puri?

  All right. So the export example, there's a company called Launch Darkly. Are you familiar with them? I have not. Basically at Facebook and many big companies, they, they have obviously, you know, you got a billion users. If you launch a feature that sucks or is buggy or is going to decrease engagement, like, you know, leaving a feature that, that decreases revenue by 1% can be, you know, tens of millions of dollars for, for these companies. So you have to be really smart about how you roll out a feature. And especially with the App Store, you don't want to roll something out and then have to go through App Store reapproval and take seven days. Like this is how it used to be. So Facebook built a system internally, from what I understand, that was basically like, it lets you launch a feature with a feature flag, meaning it's off by default. And then the engineer from the backend can turn it on for a subset of people. You could say, I want 1% of users to see this only.

• 31:36Shaan Puri?

  And if it goes good with a 1%, then I'll up, I'll turn my knob and I'll get take it to 5%, 10%, etc. So this is like a standard feature that big companies have, but small companies were never going to build the infrastructure to do something like this. And so LaunchDarkly was like, you know, a couple of ex-Facebook people spun out and they're like, hey, whatever, I forgot the internal name of that tool at Facebook. It's like, let's call it whatever codename Medallion. It's like, oh, we're taking Medallion and we're making it available to every SaaS company that exists. And these guys have crushed it. They've raised over $50 million and it's, it's a sort of a known, known quantity that you're taking the, the R and D of Facebook, the infrastructure of Facebook, and then you're basically saying, no other company, no small company could afford this investment. We'll do the investment once and we'll sell it to every small company for, you know, a small monthly fee.

• 32:21Shaan Puri?

  And so they, they've been tremendously successful with a, with a small feature like that.

• 32:25Anthony Pompliano?

  The first time I ever heard of this, and I'd never heard of this export, you know, framework is

• 32:30Shaan Puri?

  because that's fucking trademarked. It's your boys' original.

• 32:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, people forget like before you go work at these big companies, even, and I joined Facebook when it was 3,800 employees, like 4,000, somewhere in there. And when I left, like basically two years later, it was already 12,000. It's like, like literally right when we were really, really scaling. And you forget like life beforehand because you walk in and like a bunch of these tools are there and you're like, wow, I can like go 1% and then 5%. Oh, I can target based on geography and we should go to New Zealand because New Zealand speaks English and reporters don't, you know, nobody, reporters are there. So they don't know what features are getting tested and you know, whatever. But the first time that I started to help a friend after Facebook, I was like, oh, well, you should obviously just figure out like, what is your hook? That identifies retention. And he was like, what do you mean?

• 33:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was like, well, at Facebook, like, I think if I remember correctly, it's like, if you get 10 friends in seven days or something, right? If you like friend 10 people, then like there's like an 85% chance, whatever the number is.

• 33:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but like that takes forever at an early stage company.

• 33:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, of course.

• 33:32Sam Parr?

  That's gonna take me four weeks to get like any interesting data. So I just gotta figure it out now.

• 33:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and, and what they would do is, uh, one, you've got to have the system to do the testing, right? Two, you gotta have enough data over a long enough period of time to actually know, did it lead to, you know, 30, 90, uh, you know, two-year retention rates, all that kind of stuff. Uh, and then the third thing is you're gonna have the engineering capacity to change your product around to test all the different things. So I remember being like, oh, this is gonna be so easy. Like, you know, it's literally like an internal tool, whatever. And he was like, what do you mean? Like, I have like one engineer, you know, two engineers, whatever it was. He was like, I can't do that. It's sort of like Googling around. And there was a company Amplitude, which I think now is like pretty popular, actually. But that was like one of their big early selling points was like, hey, we can basically look at a bunch of your retention data and tell you like, here's the thing that is the highest signal as to having a retained user base. And then you can like, basically manipulate your products, like make

• 34:19Anthony Pompliano?

  everyone go do that thing. So for Facebook, it's, you know, if it's trending, let's force everyone to give us their contacts, their emails, like whatever we could possibly do, suggest the right friends. Once they hit their 10 friend, you know, quota or whatever, then we can back off and let them enjoy Facebook. But like, we're super aggressive in the first seven days to make sure that they hit that. Right. For every product, there's something.

• 34:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Slack has like, your, I think it's a thousand messages was the, was the milestones. Like, once you get past a thousand messages, you'll never turn off Slack or something like that. Like, a bunch of different companies have their, their magic moment where it's like, once you pass this magical threshold, we, we know we got you. You're, you're, you hit core value. You understand what this is all about. And you're gonna have a great experience.

• 35:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 35:01Sam Parr?

  So, well, I want to give you a second to think about that, because

• 35:04Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 35:05Sam Parr?

  Because Sean put you on the spot a little bit, and, or we both did. But, uh, let me tell you something that I heard this week. Uh, there's this guy named Nick Huber, I think his name is that I met. I was driving, doing, and doing a live Twitter thing. And he like started talking, I go, dude, let me talk to you now. And he like called my other phone and we did like a live interview on Twitter. It's kind of cool. And he was like, so what this guy did was, he was in a service business. And then he started to buy storage companies and put software on it. And he's consolidating them. And that's cool. But he was like, the thing that I learned about a service business is that it's, it's not a problem about having too much demand. Because if I'm providing a service that's popular, like, I'm always going to have customers who want it. The problem that I found is that

• 35:49Sam Parr?

  I can't like the people who want to work in this industry. It's hard to train them and I need to and he's like the real problem is and I didn't want to solve this problem was I needed to come up with a training system that I could. Teach a fifth grader how to do X, Y, and Z and have a repeatable and make it work well. Have you guys ever heard of this? I mean, I don't know anything about services, but have you heard of this problem before, Sean?

• 36:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think this is the the limit of every service business is how do I have enough people? I can't scale my time. I don't either want to or I can't anymore. So can I get other people to do what I do without losing the magic of what works for me? Right? Like that's the biggest issue.

• 36:24Sam Parr?

  And so I started researching this. There's and there's there's a few things that do this. The first is there's a company called HealthStream. HealthStream is publicly traded. It's based in Nashville. I think it does 300 million in revenue and they. Teach nurses how to do the latest procedures. So if it like for Corona, it's like, all right, the new procedure for welcoming people is to do X, Y, and Z and they just have like. It's basically they just make videos and everyone logs in and watches the video. What are some interesting businesses that this could work for? You know, it's a and I've noticed it with my company even like training people. To do this thing is it's actually hard. Like I just create this Google Doc and I'm like, fuck, they're not even going to read this, even though it's going to make their job better.

• 37:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's it's two problems, right? So one is the people who know how to do the task, like one, they've got to be good at documenting it. And then two is you've got to get people to actually consume the content as well, right? So it's almost like this twofold problem. And I got to imagine that there's a big business in every single regulated industry, right? So for CFAs, for nurses, you know, just go down the line. Where you mandate the training. So like, oh, there's some regulation or oversight committee or, you know, whatever the thing is that forces everyone to, you know. Be up to date on whatever the latest stuff is. And if those rules are in place, then basically the demand is, you know, infinite because it's just how many nurses are there in the country? They all have to take this training.

• 37:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like, I can just go build the business and I know that I can walk in every hospital and they have to buy from either me or one of my competitors, right?

• 37:50Shaan Puri?

  My buddy is in the like, I don't know if you call it like, he's like a professional speaker or something. He like goes and does workshops and. His his, he basically has three, two, three types of clients. One is like high end company like a Ferrari or, you know, whatever Chipotle, like a big company is, you know. You know, Mastercard will hire him to come in and talk. And then half the time when he's on the road, he's like, yeah, I'm at the Iowa middle school district, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, cool. You're doing like a pro bono thing. And he was like, no, like dude, these schools pay more than the companies. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, they have this like professional development budget that they have to spend. And then they have these like, whatever the like, kind of target is of the year, like he's like, except for last year, it was all about growth mindset. And so I'm the best guy for growth mindset. And so every single school district wanted me and had

• 38:35Shaan Puri?

  thousands of dollars to throw at me to come talk to seventh graders or fourth graders about, you know, about this and the teachers also that, you know, they, they have, they have a budget for this. He's like, and then the next year it'll be around, you know, social emotional learning or like whatever. It's like, whatever the, the top level says, hey, this is the mandated thing you all got to learn. It's kind of like your nurses thing. It's like, we all got to learn this procedure or this technique or the business best in class. And then some, you know, some speaker somewhere is like, oh shit payday. This year I'm going on tour like Lady Gaga. And that's what he basically does. It's like incredible.

• 39:07Anthony Pompliano?

  But I also think masterclass is like a version of this, right? It's, it's unstructured training. It's not for a specific job, but it's like the self-improvement, professional development, whatever. Like there's a lot of people that buy that. The other element is like, who's paying, right? So like that nursing training, the nurse isn't paying for it. It's from coming from one of these budgets or whatever. But I do actually think that there's going to be, and not in like the, there's kind of like the sleazy, like let me teach you to make money on the internet type stuff. But much more like, hey, how do you start a podcast? Hey, how do you, you know, create a successful newsletter, right? Like, like saying, if you guys came out with that tomorrow, it's like you would sell a lot of whatever that is.

• 39:46Sam Parr?

  Well, don't worry, we are.

• 39:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And there you go. Right? So like, but, but it's just like, as you kind of go down the line, you could look at what are all the successful things that people have done on the internet? And if you understand how they did it, or you go get them to do it, if they just document their process, like there's somebody in the world who wants to be that person or have that type of business. And they'd be willing to, to pay for it. It may not be, you know, a billion dollar business, but make a couple million bucks a year just selling, you know, training manuals on a million internet jobs, right?

• 40:13Sam Parr?

  My father-in-law is in the moving business. He owns a moving business called Eagle Transport where you live, uh, pump in, uh, Manhattan. It's a great company. And I'm like, why haven't you, like, it's a cash flow thing. It provides him a wonderful living. And I'm like, why haven't you expanded, expanded? And this is a common thread because my father owns an old school company as well. I'm like, why haven't you expanded? He goes, I don't want to train these people. Like it's too hard. Like it's such a pain and you're worth like a. I mean, I'm just gonna sound like a dick. You work with a lot of like lower end people. It's like they're like have issues. You don't want to fucking teach them and they're always a pain in the ass. And I'm like, why don't you? He's like, I don't want to deal with all these people. This is just enough already. And I'm like, what can I, what can I do to just?

• 40:54Shaan Puri?

  This is, this is, uh, it's not about training. It's about actually replacing and automating. Like this is, the training is an intermediary step that's never gonna be good enough. And like what's happening? So, so I have a friend, he's, he's big time investing in automation. That's his, that's his thing. So he's always telling me like, I invested in this pizza robot company. I'm like, oh, cool. It's like some sexy consumer thing. He's like, no, like, basically they're just trying to get a pizza that can make perfect pizzas 24/7 that they'll sell to Domino's and Domino's will replace four employees. And be like, hey, Domino's, these, this machine never gets sick, never complains, never checks its phone while at work. And, uh, this machine will just spit out the same pizza all day 24/7. How, how does that sound? How much will you pay for that?

• 41:35Shaan Puri?

  And then they're basically like, oh, you know, how much money do I have? Let me give it, let me give it all to you. And so there's automation, like, I don't know if you've noticed, there's this, there was this head fake early on with like, kind of like in restaurants, like digital menus, kiosks, like stuff like that. And then it fucking happened, both in airports and in restaurants. Like you'll, you'll see the kind of order here, kiosk, uh, tablets. There's a company called Toast that I think crushes it with this. Um, like, I don't want to say a number, but it's a lot of revenue every single year. And it's, it's all because they can do the math and basically say, hey, we save you two, two headcount worth. And when I save you that headcount, you also don't need the manager because the manager spends what percentage of time dealing with the headaches of people no showing or not, not underperforming or training or whatever.

• 42:19Shaan Puri?

  Uh, because, you know, these people switch jobs all the time. And so, uh, like Sam, the solution to your thing, I think in most cases is actually going to be a form of automation. Uh, where you just get rid of the human in, in the loop altogether.

• 42:31Sam Parr?

  I agree.

• 42:31Anthony Pompliano?

  There, there's also a macro trend here, which I think is, um, Chamath and I had this. You know, epic podcast episode where he basically outlaid a very simple framework was, which was simply the United States economy has pursued efficiency over resiliency. And so we basically ran around the world, tried to find the most efficient, lowest cost way to produce things. We became really, really good at it. And then like this pandemic basically exposed the fact that we gave up resiliency for efficiency. And so his argument is that like, we're going to swing the pendulum back, maybe not all the way, but like in some direction where resiliency is going to become important again. And you see this with like, American companies want to, you know, onshore their manufacturing, their supply chains, like whatever.

• 43:10Anthony Pompliano?

  The number one advantage that the American human labor worker has had is the fact that automation hasn't been able to replace them. Right? Like, that's their biggest moat is the fact that like, a machine hasn't been able to do their job. And so therefore, when these companies bring back those manufacturing facilities or those supply chains, now the tech's actually getting pretty close, like 3D manufacturing, automation, like whatever it is. And so if you just re, if you just brought back your facility to the United States and tried to use American labor at the cost, you would like four to five X the labor cost that you have compared to Southeast Asia or wherever. So like, it almost would be like cost prohibitive to do it. But if you can instead use automation and 3D printing or whatever it is, now you can actually bring it back to the United States,

• 43:55Anthony Pompliano?

  increase your resiliency and keep some like barrier of efficiency as well. And so I think like, one, there's going to be this rise in popularity of the automation and 3D printing. But also, there's going to be a lot of people who like, got to go find new jobs. Right? And so like, how long does that take? What do they do? You know, we can get into all that, but it's just like, that trend I think is going to become really, really important as we come out of this COVID stuff.

• 44:16Sam Parr?

  Is there any space where you've seen that you're shocked it's not automated?

• 44:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, like everything. I mean, it's, it's a thing where like, we all overestimate, right? What's Boogie say? Like, we, we overestimate what we can do in one year. Like, if you literally think of almost every single job, I think that we all believe it's going to be automated. Like, how many people thought? You know, cars were going to be automated and self-driving at this point. Like, there's a lot of people, right? How many people thought that the segue would eventually turn into the like automated robot that goes around the office buildings and makes sure that, you know, it's acts as a security guard, right? Or there's some level of shutting off the lights when no one's in the room. So it saves on the energy bill. But right now there's humans that literally walk around a big office building like shut all the lights off. Like stupid little things that each one of those applications probably ends up being a business at some point.

• 45:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And then you get the like bundling of, okay, like, I'm just going to be the guy who goes and buys up all the businesses that optimize the operations of a commercial real estate building. So let me buy the security robot company. Let me buy the light company, you know, whatever. And then they build a big conglomerate and then somebody 20 years from now like unbundles it all again, right? And says, hey, I'm going to go and I'm going to compete, whatever. So it's just, I think business cycles in general play out that way. And, uh, you know, we're on the, the start of automation.

• 45:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome.

• 45:36Shaan Puri?

  Uh, there's an export one that's sort of related to what you're talking about, Sam.

• 45:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Shaan Puri?

  Facebook, they have, they have this, uh, developer bootcamp, right? So like, I have a friend who, he was my buddy. He was like a, I don't know, like a finance guy kind of thing, went to Facebook, worked in the fraud department. And then he went to the Facebook developer bootcamp that they have internally, which is like, hey, in like eight weeks or so, you can learn to be an engineer at Facebook. You'll start at the kind of the bottom, but then you can grow from there. And, um, and now he's like CTO of some tech company in New York and he basically, you know, after a few years at Facebook, so he did the bootcamp, worked as an engineer at Facebook for two, three years and then left and then went to this company that was like a well-funded, well-run company. It was like, they're like, kind of doing the interview and his, his pitch was so simple. It was so beautiful. He goes, he just goes, I make your engineering team work like a Facebook engineering team.

• 46:22Shaan Puri?

  He's like, I know that process. That's how I work. I'll just use that. Like I will take our blue, our playbook over there and I'll make them work over here.

• 46:29Anthony Pompliano?

  What's that?

• 46:29Shaan Puri?

  It's sort of like saying like, you know, I'm from the Navy SEALs. I, you know, I, I'll come to your gym and I'll train you like a SEAL. And it's like, oh shit. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that's what I want. And so, so he's now the CTO of some company. And so that same thing though, like, What Facebook did, which was not like just some online course, you can click a button and take or go to Lynda.com and we bought you six credits. It's like, no, there's a physical place in the building where you go and you get to do that for eight to nine weeks. You get paid and then you walk out, you know, with a certain set of skills. That's Lambda School inside of a company. And so Facebook can afford to do it. I don't know how many, I don't know if Google has the same. I'm sure there's companies have variations of this, but there's going to be a central company that does that as a service to every company.

• 47:12Shaan Puri?

  So PWC and Deloitte and all these other people, they'll have a bootcamp run by like, you know, whoever. I think General Assembly was trying to do this at one point in time, but like somebody who specifically focuses on upskilling people for coding or upskilling for like using no code tools. I think those will be like, that's a no, if I, if I really wanted to run a kind of a people and service heavy business, but still make big bucks. I think that would be a way to do it is to go to big old school companies and say, look, we put the Facebook bootcamp inside Visa and we will train you, train up some people here and we'll train them like the Facebook people trade Facebook. And that would be, I think, a dope business.

• 47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  People don't understand how, how crazy that training process is like as a product manager. I can't remember if it was four or eight weeks, but when you first get to Facebook, like you don't even have a team. Like they're literally like, hey, you're going to go here for like four weeks or whatever it was. And they like teach you all about product management at Facebook, but it's not just product management. It's like product management at Facebook, like here's how we do things. Here's why we do them here. Here's all the things you need to know, whatever. And Chris Cox, who was the chief product officer that left and then came back. He talked to every single incoming class of employees. Like, I mean, it was like, this is serious to us, right? This wasn't like a, here's a one day indoctrination, like here's where the bathroom is, you know, here's who your manager is. And like, if you have any problems, like, you know, send an email to HR. Like this was like a real thing.

• 48:32Shaan Puri?

  When I got to Twitch, the first day onboarding, it was that, you know, first half of the day was like, hey, you're going to get your laptop. And then my guy, like the IT guy was like, hey, sorry, we're short on laptops, so I'll get yours tomorrow. So I'm just sitting there while everyone else boots up and then is like, all right, it's lunchtime. Your lunch buddy, someone who works at the company will come get you. Guy never comes and I was like, cool onboarding complete. That was the whole, that was the whole thing like this is a, this is a multi-billion dollar company. And so some companies have this like very rigorous process, like the, the Facebook car wash they put you through where it's like, you come in as like, you know, you know, smart kid from wherever Harvard or wherever you are, but you're still going to go through that six week car wash and come out like, you know, Facebook product manager number three, three, four, three. And, uh, you know, that works for them.

• 49:15Sam Parr?

  So I'm going to read you guys, let me see if I can find it. So you guys know Gartner, so I, I mock Gartner a lot because I think it's kind of a, it's, I think it's a little bit of a scam. Not everyone agrees. I think it's kind of scammy how they do things, but pump, do you know, uh, what they do? Like, you know,

• 49:32Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like the research and they poll people and do all that stuff, right?

• 49:35Shaan Puri?

  I feel like you mock them, but you're just, it's like second graders that tease each other, but they actually like each other. It's like,

• 49:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, no, I have a lot of respect for them. No, I, I, I totally do, but I was reading this breakdown of how they work because Gartner, they've been around since I think the seventies, maybe it's worth like 15 billion dollars. And a lot of people are like, how does Gardner do it? Because their research is like only okay. But I was reading a breakdown and they're like their sales training is the best sales training in the industry. And that they purposely churn like 25% a year of their salespeople because they want a cutthroat. They, they want it to be cutthroat. And when you first sign up, they do two months of training and they fly you to a isolated Florida hotel where they split you into teams that compete against one another in high pressure sales games every single day.

• 50:22Sam Parr?

  And around 10% of her class was fired within the first two weeks, but the others who made it bonded over it and they shared trauma. And they consider themselves an elite cohesive sales organization of highly, uh, like a highly coveted team. And that's how, and they do, it's an eight week.

• 50:37Shaan Puri?

  That's like the, the back of the DVD of like taken three. It's like, I have an elite set of skills that I've been trained for.

• 50:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Sounds like bootcamp, like literally like military bootcamp.

• 50:45Shaan Puri?

  They give you coronavirus on day two, just to see if your immune system can survive.

• 50:50Sam Parr?

  Well, it's that, and it's actually pretty interesting because when you think about a company, you think, well, it's the product that's amazing. But like as someone who only works in small businesses, I'm like, I forget that it could be just like this crazy, interesting. It's not even that interesting. Like you're like, oh, go obviously do that. But a lot of people don't do it, including myself. Um, about these like really good onboarding techniques. Another company I did it was Trilogy Software, which we've talked about on here, which a lot of people don't know about, but they were considered like, As good as Microsoft in the 90s and they would do the same thing where they would, they would train developers like in a crazy good way and that's how they became so valuable. And so that's kind of interesting, an interesting idea here. I don't know what to make of it, but it is something that I didn't previously know. That's for sure.

• 51:33Anthony Pompliano?

  That that stuff also I think becomes interesting because remember Cutco knives? I think is how it's called, whatever. Like basically they go door to door and they sell knives, right? Or whatever. I know a lot of kids in high school or college who would do it for money, but in the back of their head, they would say to themselves like, I'm learning a skill because the training was so extensive, blah, blah, whatever. And then like when I get done here, I'm going to have this skill forever. I bet, right? And I don't know for sure, but there's a bunch of people who go to Gartner to be in the sales program for two years and they know they're not going to, you know, spend their career there, but they just want to get the experience and skills and then they leave. And so like, that is a fantastic recruiting tool as well. And if you're going to get rid of 25% of people anyways, like you actually

• 52:17Anthony Pompliano?

  probably lose the top like 2% who are like your best people. And then you lose like, you know, your bottom 25% or 20% or whatever it is. So I, I tend to think that like the organizations that spend a lot of time on the training, like word spreads, like, hey, working there is good, but the training you get will like serve you for the rest of your career and it helps on the recruiting front.

• 52:37Sam Parr?

  So back to the import export thing. Is there anything at Facebook that you think is?

• 52:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Sam's all about this one. I feel like we haven't even said it.

• 52:45Sam Parr?

  So, so. Well, you said a few, but Snapchat as well. The, I find it so interesting. I mean, only 13 or 15 or 20, however many, 10s of thousands of people do work at Facebook, but they are world-class at so many different things. What, or Snap? Let's do Snap. Snap's even more mysterious to me.

• 52:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, Facebook is the easier one because I think that people will understand some of the tools and it's probably more, it's a better comp to like what most people are building. And so I would say three things come to mind. The first is the data science team at Facebook is absolutely world-class and they understand better than anyone in the world, kind of the pursuit of truth. And so if you look at the people who have left there, everyone from, You know, the Chamasa of the world, whatever, like, it's just this pursuit of like, I don't care what opinions are like, show me the data and I'm going to set up the test frameworks in order to actually get to the truth. And it all boils down to this one key insight that I had when I was there and I didn't have like a eureka moment, like they literally just told me it.

• 53:42Anthony Pompliano?

  They were like, hey, when you run these tests, there's two things that are really important. One, you gotta have very clear goal, like what are we going to measure success and failure by? And then two, whatever the test is, has to be executed perfectly. And if you don't execute it perfectly and then it doesn't work, you're left asking yourself like, was it because we ran the test wrong? Or is it because actually we should go spend our time doing something else? Right? So it's like the perfect execution component. And so I, I think that this testing framework, there's been tons and tons of tools, but very similar to what Sean said about, um, kind of like, hey, I'll make your, uh, software team like Facebook. Just teaching the art of data science and testing and like the pursuit of truth. I think there's a massive business to be built there.

• 54:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Consequently, there's a bunch of software that you can build around this as well, like you could see yourself, you go in, you do the training and they're like, oh, by the way, like, you know, here's all the watches underneath my jacket. Like, you know, here's my analytics tool. Here's my, uh, screen recording tool. So you can watch user pathway. Here's my data science tool, you know? Here's my way that you communicate with customers. Like you could just walk down every single touch point that, uh, that growth team would have with a product. And then just build your own piece of software. And so it's almost this like consultative sales piece where you're making a bunch of money upfront on training. And then on the back end, you're following it with, uh, software and kind of getting more LTV out of it.

• 55:02Shaan Puri?

  I have a funny story about this. So I met a guy, this is unconfirmed. So this might be total bullshit. I don't know, but

• 55:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I like it already.

• 55:08Shaan Puri?

  It's hilarious.

• 55:10Anthony Pompliano?

  It's definitely true. By, by the time you're done, it's going to be true.

• 55:12Shaan Puri?

  So exactly. So, uh, I'll just share it to, you know, hundreds of thousands of people because, you know, why not? So, so this is guy works at Facebook, high up, and he uses these tools that you're talking about, the testing tools specifically. Uh, I believe that there's a tool. Maybe it's called Titan. Maybe it's not called Titan. I don't know exactly. But there's a tool that basically when you run a test, it tells you not just did your test work like, oh, we made the button blue that made, you know, did more people click that button? But it says, hey, here's every other KPI also. So you didn't fuck up something else while you're trying to fix one thing. You actually dropped another thing. So it gives you this like really great way to analyze the whole picture, not just your specific thing. Anyways, I don't know much about this tool, but here's what I, here's what I had heard. I heard that this person was like, okay, I'm going to spin this out.

• 55:56Shaan Puri?

  I'm going to export this idea. I'm going to go make this its own startup. They recruit a couple of people from internal like, hey, leave with me. Let's go do this. They raised, they actually raised money. They go, they rent an office, everything. And they get some, you know, goes into the office to tell Zuck like, hey, you know, thanks for everything, you know, but like peace out, I'm going to go do this. And something happened in that meeting that I don't know, but we believe here's what, here's what ended up happening. The startup never take, never get started. The office rent, they, they just pay it off. They don't ever go move into the office. Person keeps working at Facebook. And I believe what ended up happening was that Zuck basically was like, uh, you know, you could go do that. But like, here's just, um, oh, a giant bag of money that I have with me.

• 56:38Shaan Puri?

  Like, how about this instead? And like, how about you stay and you take this bag of money? And we forget you ever said anything about leaving. And then the guy was like, no, no, no, like, I really want to do this. Actually, I've told my family. I rented an office space. I'm, I'm, I'm already two feet out the door. And he's like, oh, oh, cool. Okay. So, um, so we're not going to let you do this company. Actually, we're going to, we're going to have to pursue some action against you. But again, there's this bag of money and this is a great role. If you just want to stay with the bag of money and the great role, you tell me which way you want to go. And so, um, I don't know exactly how the conversation went down, but from what I have heard, there was a conversation like this that happened. Again, I might've been told bullshit, but I loved the story either way. And I choose to believe that this was true. And this person still works at Facebook.

• 57:18Sam Parr?

  Did you guys read the, uh, the?

• 57:20Shaan Puri?

  Text messages?

• 57:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So Sean like is obsessed with this and I, he got me obsessed with it where he was like, he like goes and like emails the founders of huge companies like, hey, forward me the emails when you were describing the early idea of your company. I love seeing the evolution and.

• 57:34Shaan Puri?

  I want the raw text. I'm like a fucking paleontologist looking for the original source material.

• 57:38Sam Parr?

  It's pretty cool. I like it as well. He's got me into it. And so, uh, to the listeners, uh, last week, this, this, some type of chat. Transcript got out of Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, talking to a friend who was or talking to someone who I think was an investor of Instagram, but who also worked at Facebook, I think.

• 57:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's got Matt Cohler. He was early at Facebook and he's a big time VC.

• 58:01Sam Parr?

  And and they were chatting back and forth and Kevin was like, hey, Matt, Zuck messaged me like he wants to. He said this, I think he means this. And then they were talking back and forth about what that could mean. And they were like, he's gonna crush you. So like, if you don't do this right, like, he doesn't care. He only, he's gonna, he's gonna destroy you. So play ball.

• 58:22Anthony Pompliano?

  The exact quote in there, Kevin Systrom asked, he's like, if we say no, will he just like go into destroy mode? And the VC was just like, yeah, probably.

• 58:34Anthony Pompliano?

  He's like, fuck. Okay. So what do I say that will not trigger destroy mode? He's like, maybe we could just say, oh, we're, we're just trying to do this little filter thing. We don't, we don't really see ourselves as like, you know, becoming a social network. And he's like, yeah, he's also really smart. Like he's not.

• 58:47Sam Parr?

  That's what he said. He goes, he's too smart. And he's like, well, should we tell him that we're gonna sell to Twitter? He goes, you could, he'll, he'll destroy you. Uh, I thought it was amazing. Did you, and I know we're about at time. Did you ever have moments of that where you're like, oh, God, this guy's like Genghis Khan. He's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna destroy.

• 59:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't remember how many times I met with Zuck, but was always in a group setting. So it was never like we had like a one on one, but I was fortunate to work on this very small team that was specifically trying to help figure out like, how do we grow Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg's personal Facebook pages? Right? So they, they didn't want to like manipulate the product, right? Like you could, I literally remember we were, I remember we were like one meeting and like one of the ideas at one point was like, well, why don't we just like put it in interstitial? It'd be like, everyone follows up, like, kind of like Tom MySpace style, you know, type thing. And then part of the beauty of like a diverse team was like, somebody else was like, no, like I grew up in a country where like the president used to like come on, you know, television and like take over the screen. And like with his like, you know, message of like conquering the people, basically.

• 59:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And he's like, like, there's certain places in the world, like you don't want to do this, right? And so what they ended up saying was like, okay, like, we're just gonna have to do this without manipulating the product. And like, that's like the most fair way to do it. Uh, and so we'd be in these meetings and the thing that always struck me was like, you've got a guy who. Runs a multi-billion dollar business, been working on it a long time. And he could be talking about like, super long-term company strategy. And then immediately, like, there's a presentation up and he would like zero in on a screenshot and be like, uh, why is that buttons pixel like what? And you're like, dude, you just went from like a hundred thousand feet to like ground floor, you know,

• 1:00:28Anthony Pompliano?

  level feedback, back to a hundred thousand and then shifted like left or right on various products. And we've been in here for seven minutes. Like, like your, your capacity in terms of like ingesting information and also being able to like sift through high signal, low signal stuff is just like bar none. And so I was telling somebody internally at the company at the time, they're like, well, look, first you have to remember like, he has the most context here, right? He's literally been at the company the longest. And so like, he's seen like these iterations of the product. He remembers the conversations before they got launched, the things that went right, the things that went wrong, like whatever. But it was still this thing of just like, man, this dude's on it. And so like, I'll read articles even today and people like say whatever they want about Zuck.

• 1:01:12Anthony Pompliano?

  They've like never talked to him or never met him or whatever. And I'm like, do you think he like built a multi-billion dollar company because he's an idiot?

• 1:01:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:01:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, and the thing that I'll, I'll leave you with on Zuck is a friend of mine was talking about them when they first announced Libra and going into crypto. And he's like, look, there's a lot of people who probably don't like Zuck, but there's not that many people who thinks he's dumb.

• 1:01:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:01:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so like, you may not like him for whatever your personal preference, you know, reason is, but like, if he's going to do something, a lot of people are going to be like, wait, why is Zuck and Facebook going to do it? Right? And they were talking specifically about crypto, but like, I think that's generally true across a lot of different things. And so if all of a sudden people hear like, you know, they're making a huge investment in VR. There's a lot of other people who are like, wait, why is he doing that? Like, what does he know that I don't know? And, and you know, they try to start looking around the corner, but I think what you saw, I didn't see the text messages, but I saw some emails or something, I think from an Instagram thing. It's just like, look, he saw the future, right? Or at least like where he thought it was going and he like pretty much was like directionally correct, which is pretty impressive.

• 1:02:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's crazy. Interesting. I love those stories. Thank you. Me too. We should go. Yeah, you want to wrap this up? Damn, I feel like we were just scratching the surface, but this was this was great. Pumped. Thanks for coming on, man. Hope you can come on again. I think people are really gonna like you and your your your thoughts. So I appreciate you coming in.

• 1:02:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Thanks, guys, for having me.

• 1:02:32Shaan Puri?

  This is awesome. Thank you.